Thanks for the reviews! I've been pleasantly surprised by the great response to this story. As I said, reviews make me happy, make me wish to update more, and they are also a great "tonic" for my muse...so please keep them coming! :)
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Leroy Jethro Gibbs had felt restless inside his hotel room. The lack of TV and radio hadn't bothered him in the least, but he had missed working on his boat. He had missed his basement and the memories connected with it. He had missed his bourbon.
He had missed…so much more.
Thus he had grabbed his jacket and gone out for a walk, hoping it would relax him enough to get a good night of sleep.
As he walked along the almost deserted streets of Heavenly Shores, Gibbs thought of the events of the previous 16 hours.
He had been sent to Nature's Heaven Island with just a two-hour notice to investigate the murder of a former Navy captain's wife. The widower's brother was a close friend of the SecNav, who had all but ordered Vance to send someone to check what the local police was doing to find the killer.
Vance had bowed, of course, and said to the SecNav he would send his best investigative team. In reality, he had sent only Gibbs.
The new NCIS Director thought there wasn't much to investigate – the reports from Nature's Heaven Island police said the poor woman had been the victim of a serial killer – and Vance believed it wasn't NCIS's job to catch him.
Gibbs had been sent to the island only to silence the SecNav and his friend, something that, any other time, would have totally pissed him off—but not this time.
This time he had been relieved, even happy, to be sent away from DC to do a job even a probie could do. Happy to be sent away from the office and a team he couldn't call his.
He was aware he was considered the best agent in the agency and he knew he was damn good at his job, but as the military man he still was, he also knew a commanding officer was as good as his men made him look. That was why he never showed up to receive the medals awarded to him, because he knew those medals weren't only his—they belonged to his team too, and he was upset not to see his colleagues' merits being recognized along with his own.
And now that he no longer had his team-- the one he had created to suit him and his methods, and could trust with his life-- Gibbs felt like a shadow of the agent he could be. He spent too much time teaching, correcting, checking, controlling, barking orders to Lee, Langer and Keating to be the agent he used to be and wanted to be again. The agent he needed to be again.
Atop of that, he had to deal with Abby who, one day in, one day off, kept asking him what he was doing to bring Tony, Ziva and Tim back. Gibbs loved Abby dearly, but sometimes he needed a break even from her well-intended words.
Didn't she know he had been wracking his brain trying to find a way to bring Ziva, DiNozzo and McGee back? Didn't she know he spent hours every day trying to understand why Vance had disbanded the most effective team NCIS had? Had only Tony and Ziva been sent away, Gibbs could have believed it was a punishment for their failure to protect Jenny – although it wasn't their fault since they had been ordered to stay away – but if it were so, why had McGee been punished too? Gibbs had even thought Vance was punishing him or trying to bring him more under his control. There was no doubt that without a loyal team having his six and trusting him with no questions asked, he no longer had the freedom of action he had in the past.
However, the loss of his team, as hard as it was to cope with, wasn't the only thing burdening him.
It was another loss that kept him awake at night, that had made him smash more than one empty bourbon bottle against the pillars in his basement, that had made him look at Shannon, Kelly and Jenny's pictures and murmur, "No, please, not another one…"
Leroy Jethro Gibbs had never been an overtly open man. He had closed up after his mother's death, and it had worsened after he had lost his family. However, even if he found it difficult to talk and reveal his feelings to others, he was usually able to admit them to himself—even if most of the time he ended up not acting upon them and suffocating them.
This hadn't been the case with his love for Ziva David.
He hadn't acted on it not because of rule number twelve or because he hadn't been willing to risk his heart again, but simply because he hadn't realized he loved the Israeli woman until the moment she had been taken away from him.
Until the moment he had seen her brown eyes fill with tears when she had spotted the two men Mossad had sent to escort her away. What had they feared? That Ziva would decide to kill or harm Vance? She might have had the desire to do it, but she was too smart to do something like that…so out in the open.
The moment Gibbs had seen his brave, little assassin's eyes look at him full of despair, he had felt like someone had kicked him in the stomach. He had felt like that many years before, when he had seen Shannon and Kelly's tears as the truck he was on pulled away from their home taking him to Iraq and war—and it was then, in that precise moment, he had realized he loved Ziva David.
Not as a colleague; not as a pupil and certainly not as a surrogate daughter. He loved her as the woman he wanted to spend his life with. The woman Gibbs didn't want to lose and yet risked not seeing again…
No! That won't happen! he thought, kicking a stone on the street and making it land several feet ahead.
He would find a way to bring her back to DC—and him. And once it was done, he would play all his cards, forget or abolish rule number twelve, tell Ziva he loved her and hope she would want a cranky, stubborn, taciturn, middle-aged, slightly-worn Marine with a bad knee in her life.
Yes, he had been hurt many a time in the past, but this time he felt it could be different. So very different.
Ex-wives number one and two had been subconscious attempts to recapture what he had had with Shannon—but deep inside he had known they weren't the real deal, and this was why he had never opened enough to tell them about the family he had lost.
It could have been different with Jenny. She hadn't been a replacement and he had planned to confide his past to her, to thank her for finally healing his heart—but she had left him to pursue a career she believed she couldn't have if she tied herself to him.
Stephanie had been his way to replace Jenny, and she was the only ex-wife he regretted hurting.
Rule number twelve had been created just after the "Shepard's Fiasco", as he had referred to it for a while, but now his gut told him that things could be different with Ziva.
She wasn't as career-driven as Jenny had been. She would never like to deal with politicians and ass-kiss her way up in the ranks. She was more like him, she wanted to be in the field and do the best job she could.
True, it was possible she might not reciprocate his feelings, but something he had seen in her gaze just before she left, a pained look of longing directed at him, told him he would be a fool if he didn't take his chances—and Gibbs was many things, but certainly not a fool.
"Help me!" A sudden cry broke the stillness of the moonless night and interrupted his musings. "Somebody help me!"
Without even thinking, Gibbs grabbed his gun and ran in the direction the cry had come from.
He saw something move in the darkness, two people were struggling on the paved road, each of them trying to overwhelm the other.
"Freeze!" he shouted as he came closer, "I'm armed!" He hoped to scare the assailant, because it was too dark and they were moving too much to allow him to take aim.
One of the figures reacted to his threat and stood up, quickly disappearing into one of the alleys that opened on the sides of the street.
Gibbs thought briefly of following him, but then decided it was better to see if the victim was all right. So he put away the gun and covered the final distance that separated him from the still supine figure.
"Are you all right?" he asked, hoping that whoever they were, were fine, because he had no idea of how he could ask for medical help without a phone.
The victim of the attack sat up and he realized it was a woman, with long, probably dark hair, covering her face.
Gibbs stopped a few steps behind her and asked again, more gently, "Are you all right?"
He watched, almost fascinated, as she pushed her hair back, away from her face, curious to see the woman that had been so reckless to be alone in the darkness with a probable serial killer on the loose.
His fascination transformed to shock when the woman turned her head up and to the right to face him and he saw it was Ziva.